Linwood Barclay - Trust Your Eyes

Lewis said, “Don’t you ever look at porn or anything?”

Thomas didn’t appear to understand whether this was a serious question. He said, “I don’t have time.”

Lewis was clicking from image to image, city to city. All the different places Thomas had been exploring today-well, yesterday now. It had to be after midnight. “Why do you-no, I’ll let Howard ask you. No sense going over it twice.”

He got out of Whirl360 and opened up the mail program.

Thomas said to me, “He shouldn’t be reading those.” Then he started in with questions. “What city are we in? What street are we on? What’s the address?”

I’d been wondering the same thing, although maybe not with the same level of detail. We’d been driving long enough to be in New York or Boston or Buffalo and probably half a dozen other urban centers. We could be in Philadelphia, for all I knew.

Nicole ignored him, as did Lewis.

Thomas looked at me. “I want to go home.”

“I know. I know. Just try to hang in.”

Lewis was opening one e-mail after another, shaking his head slowly, no doubt trying to puzzle out what the hell Thomas was up to with all his updates to the CIA.

“What the fuck…”

He continued to read updates while Nicole looked around the room. She’d pull out a book, check the cover, put it back. She took a doll off the shelf and examined it like it was a souvenir from another planet. “My mother didn’t let me play with dolls,” she said to no one in particular.

Everyone looked up when we heard a knock. It came from a different direction than the way we’d come in. We’d entered this room, it seemed to me, from a side door, but the knock sounded as though it was coming from the front. Lewis left the computer, pulled aside a green curtain that served as a door between this room and the front of the shop. As light spilled into the front room I could make out more, and more orderly, displays of antique toys.

“It’s him,” Lewis said to no one in particular as he slipped out of the room.

Who was him? It had been mentioned more than once that someone wanted to talk to us. Someone Lewis and Nicole reported to.

I was no less scared than I’d been since we left the house, but I was also curious. When you’re pretty sure you’re going to end up dead, wondering who you’ll meet next provides some distraction.

I heard a small bell jingle as Lewis opened a door. There was some muffled conversation, then two sets of footsteps working their way to the back of the store. I heard a man ask Lewis, “What is this place?”

Lewis said, “One of the guys who helped me move Bridget’s body owns it. He’s a toy nut.”

Bridget?

Then Lewis appeared, holding back the curtain to allow a stout, short, balding man in his fifties to come in. He was wearing a topcoat that looked like it was made of camel hair or cashmere, and an expensive suit under that.

He ran his eyes over Thomas and me. It struck me that he looked more dumbfounded than menacing.

“So, these are our guys,” he said to Lewis.

“Yup,” he said.

Then the man’s eyes landed on Nicole. She’d put away the doll and was leaning against one of the shelves stuffed with books, her arms crossed over her breasts.

“You,” he said contemptuously. “You’re the one who fucked this up.”

“Nice to meet you at last, too, Howard,” she said, meeting his gaze, staring him down.

Thomas and I gave Howard an excuse to break eye contact with her. He said to me, “Which one are you?”

“Ray Kilbride. That’s Thomas. My brother.”

Thomas said, “Tell that man-Lewis-tell him to leave my computer alone.”

Howard turned to Lewis and said, “You have it hooked up?”

“Yeah. There’s some weird shit on here. All these e-mails.”

Howard reached into his jacket for a slender case, from which he extracted a pair of reading glasses. “Open a few.”

Lewis did some clicking. Howard read quickly through the e-mails. “Are they all like this?”

“Yup.”

“All addressed to Bill Clinton, care of the CIA?”

“Yeah.”

Howard looked at us, then back at Lewis. “Tell me about the phone call again.”

“Someone called the house, asked for that one, said it was Bill Clinton. Like I said.”

“But you also said it didn’t sound like him.”

Lewis shrugged. “I mean, I’ve never talked to the man, but no, I don’t think it sounded like him.”

“People sound different on the phone,” Thomas said.

Howard was still looking at the screen. “These e-mails, they’re all in the sent file?”

“That’s right,” Lewis said.

“What about in the in-box, or the deleted messages. Are there actually any messages from Bill Clinton or anyone at the CIA?”

Lewis did some clicking. “Nothing.”

Howard said, “Hmm.” He went back through the curtain and returned with another chair. He sat it in front of Thomas and me. He looked first at me.

“Ray, I have a number of questions I need straight answers to. I suppose you understand what will happen if you don’t provide them.”

“I have a pretty good idea,” I said.

He nodded slowly, like we were on the same wavelength. “We’ll get back to the Clinton thing. But it makes sense to start from the beginning. Who do you work for?”

“I’m self-employed. I’m an illustrator. I work freelance.”

“I see. You don’t do any freelance work that’s not related to illustration?”

“No.”

“And how about you?” he asked Thomas. “For whom do you work?”

“I’m sort of self-employed, too,” he said. “But I work for the CIA.”

“That’s not true,” I said. “Thomas-”

Howard held up a hand to shush me. “Thomas, tell me what you do for the CIA.”

“I shouldn’t be telling you,” he said. “It’s black ops.”

Howard’s eyebrows shot up. “Black ops?”

“That’s what President Clinton said. But that’s just part of it.”

“If you don’t tell me, Thomas, I’m going to have them start by breaking one of your brother’s fingers.”

“Don’t hurt him,” Thomas said. But I could see him struggling with whether to sacrifice me to protect the mission.

“It’s okay,” I said. “Tell them. I’m not saying this because I don’t want them to hurt me, Thomas.” I decided to play into his worldview. “I would imagine they already know most of it, anyway.”

He nodded slowly. I wasn’t sure whether he actually believed me, or was relieved to have found a way to tell Howard what he wanted to know without feeling too guilty about it.

“Well,” Thomas said, “I’m helping them for when all the online maps disappear, because that’s going to happen sooner or later, and also I’m going to be on call, if there’s an agent in trouble. Like, if he’s on the run in Mumbai or something and doesn’t know which way to go, he’ll call me and I can tell him.” He said this all very matter-of-factly, like a kid discussing his paper route.

“Explain that a little more,” Howard said.

“Which part?”

“Any of it.”

“I memorize maps. I memorize cities. I memorize the streets. So when all the maps disappear, I can help.”

Lewis said, “The computer history’s all Whirl360.”

“You memorize streets on Whirl360?” Howard asked.

Thomas nodded. “That’s right.”

Howard smiled and tapped his own head with an index finger. “And you keep it all up here?”

Again: “That’s right.”

“So how does this work? If I give you an address, you can describe it for me?”

Thomas nodded.

Howard gave him a skeptical look. “Okay,” he said, playing along. “My mother lives on Atlantic Avenue, in Boston. She has an apartment there.”